The archbishop of Cape Town has spoken of the time he narrowly escaped death at the hands of South Africa's police during the country's apartheid years in a video interview with the archbishop of Canterbury.
Speaking to Justin Welby about the global Thy Kingdom Come prayer initiative, Archbishop Thabo Makgoba saidhe had had a personal experience of liberation at the age of 16 when he was chased by police in an armoured car after a protest.
'And this armoured car was really coming at me,' he said. 'I walked fast, it drove faster, I walked slow, it drove fast and then I ran away and I hid myself under a car where the mechanic was fixing it on a particular street.
'And I said to him, they want to kill me. And then he came out and they said to him, where's the terrorist?' The mechanic defended him as 'a young schoolboy', he said, saying: 'There are terrorists out there, why don't you get the terrorists?'
Makgoba said: 'I prayed and said "Lord, I'm in your hand," because they could have just clobbered the mechanic and me. And they left; and it was during when a number of my colleagues were killed in 1976.
'So I felt it at a personal level what he did, I felt [God's] rule, I felt his hand. And generally in South Africa we prayed, we lamented, we cried, and we saw democracy come, not with too much blood, because we thought now we're going to fight for liberation, but the churches, the mosques, the schuls and us came together and we prayed. And as Christians we were in the forefront saying, "Lord, let Thy Kingdom Come."'
Thy Kingdom Come takes place between Pentecost and Ascension, May 10-20. An initiative of the archbishops of Canterbury and York now in its third year, it has united hundreds of thousands of Christians in prayer around the world. Resources and more information are available here.
